My mom used to tell me that everybody was psychic. She said most people just ignore it; she said they didn’t WANT to know the truth, so they just pretended that they didn’t know what it was. I loved my mom, and I always will love her. But sometimes, she was just full of shit.

I learned all about the future when I was seven years old, and I cried for three days straight. I cried until I puked, and then I kept right on crying.

She knew, my mom did. She knew why I was crying, and she knew that there was nothing I could do about it and she knew that there was nothing she could do about it. She comforted me as best as she could, which really wasn’t that great, if you want to know the truth.

My mom never hugged me—she wouldn’t even touch me, if she could help it—and she NEVER told me that everything was going to be okay. Although she could be full of shit at times, she was never really a blatant liar.

We both knew that everything wasn’t going to be okay. We both knew that everything was going to be fucked sixteen ways from Saturday with a cherry on top, and neither one of us felt a need to fool ourselves about it.

What she told me was this: “The world is exactly as it should be. It always has been, and it always will be. Sometimes it seems like the world is a bad place; sometimes it seems unfair; sometimes it seems downright mean. But when that’s how it seems, you always got to remember that you’re just takin’ it personal. There’s nothing wrong with the world…sometimes we just don’t agree with it.”

She said that shit to me a lot when I was a little kid, and it never did a damn thing to make me feel any better.

My mom never called it anything like “the gift” or “the sight” or any of those other things that people call it when they’re talking about being able to see things that you have no business seeing. She called it “the curse” on a good day, and on a bad day, she usually called it something like “Hell’s TV,” or “Satan’s Porn Channel.” She was kind of cynical about things, but if anyone had a right to cynicism, it was her.

She was what you might call an open screen for Hell’s TV station. She saw shit all the time, and I’ll never know how she lasted as long as she did without losing her mind. Me, I never had episodes that lasted longer than two hours. Don’t get me wrong—two hours was plenty. But after having horrible visions for a couple of hours, I generally got a break for a day or so. My mama never got a break, so she just had to try to ignore the things she was seeing.

Let me tell you a little bit about seeing the future When you know how everything is going to end, and when you know that it’s going to end badly, it kind of kills any happy feelings you might be feeling at the moment. Sure, you see some good things abut the future, but I think it’s part of the human condition to dwell on the negative rather than the positive. Instead of thinking about how I should just enjoy the moment, I always thought about the end.

But listen, I’m getting way ahead of everything. Being able to see into the future, you find yourself getting ahead of everything quite a bit. But I’ll try to get things in order. Okay, so when I was seven years old, I learned about the future, and how it’s really not as long as you might hope. That was a quick flash—only lasted sixteen minutes—and because kids can pretty much block out anything, I didn’t think about the future again for quite some time. I was thirteen when I had my next psychic episode.

I had just managed to get my hand up Sarah Winston’s shirt, and was amazed about how great the world could be, and that was when the world suddenly decided how to show me how bad it could be.